Context
This major economic crisis of the 1930s serves as the financial backdrop for the widespread child exploitation mentioned in the poem.
What is the Great Depression?
This city is explicitly named in the poem as the urban location where kids die while "organizing workers."
What is Chicago?
This structural device is used in Stanza 3 with the rapid repetition of the word "And" to make the list of oppressors feel completely endless.
What is anaphora?
Hughes wrote "Kids who Die" to rebel against this institution, which ran articles framing young activists as "outside agitators" or "thugs."
What is the mainstream media / newspapers?
This location is referenced in the poem to highlight how child labour was heavily exploited during California's massive citrus bloom.
What are the orange groves?
The contrast created by placing the static "old and rich" directly against the dying "young and poor" is an example of this literary technique.
What is juxtaposition?
These segregationist laws in the American South dictated the era of structural racial terror that Hughes was actively protesting.
What are Jim Crow Laws?
This geographic reference in Stanza 2 carries historical weight, alluding to the trauma of enslaved families being "sold down the river."
What are the swamps of Mississippi?
Found in the hard "k" and "d" sounds of Stanza 1, this phonetic device creates an aggressive rhythm that mirrors the poem's underlying violence.
What is plosive alliteration?